Creating LOST ORBIT

Hey everyone,

I wanted to share with you some of the art and workflow that went into the creation of LOST ORBIT. If you have any requests or questions let us know and we'll try to include them.

If you want to check out more about the game itself visit our site: www.LOSTORBITgame.com


To start off I wanted to share our main character.

Harrison:
A lowly maintenance worked from the planet Vale.
- Modeled and Animated in 3D Studio Max
- Skeleton is always present under his suit in game and turned on for deaths.
- Organs were spawned on death as rigged physics objects with hinge joints.









Harrison was fairly low poly due to his size on screen. We also painted a "damaged" version of his suit to swap out half way through the game.


Even though Harrison was a simple little guy his animation tree was bananas. We ended up adding animations for every type of obstacle and intractable item to help telegraph success and failure to the player. We also found players enjoyed watching Harry die so we added a lot of death animations.

We also made different layers for specific animations to prevent the main tree from getting too cluttered.


We fed the main fly tree Speed and Direction variables to change him from a gentle fly to a more aggressive boost.

After all that we covered up Harrison in a myriad of FX and applied some animated scaling to stretch him out of teleporters to finish off his look. Here's a look at some of Harrison's animations in the final game:

 

Awesome Alex - thanks for sharing.
Did you experience any slow down, requiring some optimization tricks, from scaling the bone hierarchy?

 

My pleasure!

Lucky our game ran incredible well since the camera is almost top down so we could afford some slow/downs. We made sure we used scaling at times the player didn't need to quickly react as well, in case there was large drop in frames. Harrison's Rig was really simple too so it didn't affect the frame rate as bad as we had thought it would. Maybe dropped a frame or two

 

Harrison wouldn't make it though the darkness of space without his sidekick Atley! He flies along with Harrison, make fun of him when he dies and narrates the game. We find out everything about Harrison, the solar systems they travel through and the events surrounding Harrisons accident from Ately, he narrates the game and shares his impressions on the struggles of our little hero.







Ately in Unity: He was a simple model as well, with few moving parts. His wings and fins would fold down if he was flying fast enough and a beam would extend from his eye if he was scanning anything. He was mainly a tool we used to push the story across.






Ately went through some design iterations. We wanted to focus on silhouette and larger structures since we was mainly going to be very small on screen. We also didn't want to make him too bulky and get in the way of gameplay. We didn't want players to die or mess up because Atley was in the way.




An in game example where you race Ately! We used Unity Steer to get him following Harrison and wrote some additional scripts to help him keep up, pause for scans and restart locations on death.




And sometimes Atley is just there to shoot space fireworks!

 

The environments are really beautiful looking and deliver a true sense of depth in 'space'.

Can you show and tell how they were constructed? Im really interested in how the layers were setup and the number o layers, aannnd where the 3D stopped and the 2D began.

And why cant I get this on my current gen PS3?
What is limiting this from being offered for PS3 on the store?

Great forum thread.

 

Thanks a lot!! We're quite happy with how the environments turned out. They we're one of the things we spent the least amount of time on actually.

I'll do a post on the environments eventually and I'll make sure I cover your questions!

As for PS3 it was two fold, first we are a very small core team, just four of us, so it would have extended development quite a lot. The game is also a bit technically intensive so we worked really hard to get it running at 60FPS on the PS4 and Steam. We didn't want to ship a game that looked or played worse, and we didn't have the budget to deliver the same quality on an older console.

 

Thanks for the reply Alex. I'll be looking forward to the environment post.

Does the game support gamepad (ps3) from steam? I thought about this after I posted but thought I'd wait to see what your response was.

 

NP!

It wont support PS3 right out the box but if you use the DS3Tool you should be able to set it up.

 

LOST ORBIT features four solar systems and over 40 levels. We started designing levels with the idea that gameplay needed to come first even if the art had to suffer, coming from a AAA environment background, that was a hard decision. We were a small team, 2 artists/designer, 2 programmers and a musician, so we had to do what we could to make the game fun and still look decent.

We started with focusing on just making some kick-ass base assets, a few asteroids, gameplay assets, gates and other small props. We figured that if we didn't have the time to vary up each world the game would look repetitive but still good.


This is our base set of rocks. We used these to make every level in the game.



We were pretty happy with the look of the asteroids and for a while were content with keeping the look simple for the whole game.



We used lighting to help change the look of each system. Each system had a unique colour pallet for lighting and background assets to help differentiate them.



We started having simple backgrounds but eventually decided to paint in some planets. These textures extended across a whole level, they were quite large but we only had a hand full for the whole game.



We added cards of our asteroids above the background to add a bit of parallax without adding a whole tone of geometry. These were just renders of the asteroid assets at various scales.



We then added optimized versions of the asteroids below the play area to help add a sense of depth. These asteroids helped tie in the foreground and background together. This is a shot from the editor showing the different geometry.

 

Just realized a couple of my images got cut off from the last post. Here's the rest from the Environment post.

One of our major concerns with adding lots of geometry and detail to the backgrounds was distracting the player. LOST ORBIT gets fast and requires some quick reflexes and we didn't want the player to mix up what could kill them with a background asset. We decided to use post process to help solve this problem. This is what the game looks like with no post at all. Very confusing and flat.


We decided to use depth of field to pull the layers apart but that ended up causing issues with our FX, planets and other objects that heavily relied on transparency. So we decided to add a second camera to the scene and render the background assets with a separate pass.



Once we were happy with the general look of the game we decided to put a system together to help us change the look and feel of each world without having to edit individual assets. We created a Level Art Manager that allowed us to change the following:

• Direct and Indirect Lighting Colour, Intensity and Direction
• Background Colour
• Fog Colour
• Ambient Colour

We could change all those properties and fashion a new look to an entire solar system without ever touching a shader or scene. We would make the changes on the Art Manager prefab and it would apply those changes at run time.

This is an example of the colour variations you can get with just messing around with the Level Art Manager.


That was of course not the end of it. After a time we decided the game needed a bit more punch to help differentiate the solar systems and give it another level of polish. Next week I'll start covering the art of each Solar System and how we got it done in a few short months.

 

Hey Alex - thanks for the great thread. Can you expand upon the issues the depth pass was causing?
And wouldn't the planets still suffer from the same problem with the depth pass even with two cameras - since they were in the background - the furthest Z depth assets?

 

Looks great!. Very professional. I would like to know more things about the development, art, scripting, etc. anything you want to share.